Most linguists believe that every language has a few untranslatable words that make language in question, unique. Untranslatable words don’t mean that these words can’t be translated from one language to another but that part of the essence of the word is lost as it crosses from one language to another.This often is due to different social and cultural contexts that have shaped how the word is used.
K.R. Meera is one of the bestselling authors in Malayalam Literature and her latest book, The Unseeing Idol of Light, initially written in Malayalam has been translated into English.
Here are 5 Malayalam words that don’t directly translate to English but have profound meanings.
Category: Features
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5 Things every Long-Distance Couple will relate to
Sudeep Nagarkar’s book, All Rights Reserved For You, is a heart-warming real-life story of a couple who is separated by distance. While reading this book, we came across five things that every long distance couple will absolutely relate to. Scroll below to check them out!
A Murder on Malabar Hill – Meet the Characters
In A Murder on Malabar Hill, Sujata Massey tells us the story of Perveen, who has joined her father’s prestigious law firm as one of India’s first female lawyers. When their law firm is appointed to execute the will of Omar Farid, Perveen is suspicious of the particulars of the will that may leave Farid’s three widows vulnerable.
Perveen decides to investigate, but when tensions escalate to murder, it becomes clear that her own life is in mortal peril and she will need to use everything in her power to outwit a dangerous criminal.
Let us meet the characters from this fascinating mystery.
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Treading the passion path: 5 Off-beat Careers that are worth leaving your Current Job for
Venkat Iyer was living a fast-paced life in the IT world in Mumbai when he decided to stop and take a long, hard look at where he was headed. Disheartened by his stressful existence in the city, he decided to give it all up and take up organic farming in a small village near Mumbai.
Just like him, do you think you have what it takes to tread on the passion path? Can you quit what you are currently doing and start doing what you really love? If you are ready to take the plunge, we have listed 5 offbeat careers that we bet are certainly worth leaving your boring, 9-5 desk job for. Scroll below and get thinking!
Diver
For all water lovers, the chance of being in water all day and get paid for it too, is like a dream come true. So why not become a scuba diving instructor? We love the idea of beachy hair and a forever-tan.
Ice-cream taster
Working as an ice-cream taster is sure to thrill your inner child.
A full-time taster is asked to assess the quality of each flavor on the basis of texture, colour, smell, appearance, and other factors in addition to taste. While an exact job description depends on the employer and specific role, a taster’s additional responsibilities can include inventing new ice cream flavours and products.
Personal Shopper
Why did our school counsellors never recommend personal shopping as a career? Being paid to shop all day sounds like a pretty fabulous job profile to us!
You need to get into your client’s mind to truly understand what makes them feel and look good. If you can achieve this, you have a pretty envious career waiting out there for you.
Dog Groomer
Some benefits of becoming a dog groomer are: working with dogs on a daily basis (complete bliss), a great business opportunity- learn up the tricks of the trade as a groomer and then start your own dog grooming studio. Sounds amazing right? We agree!
Farmer
Do you wish for a job that lets you use your green thumb, with complimentary advantage of always breathing clean and fresh air and consuming the best quality organic food? Then farming is THE career for you.
Quotes from Nadeem Aslam that will Make you Fall in Love with his Work
Nadeem Aslam was born in Pakistan and now lives in England. His work has been longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the IMPAC Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and won the Kiriyama and Windham Campbell prizes and the Lannan and Encore awards. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
His works include Maps for Lost Lovers, Season of the Rainbirds, The Blind Man’s Garden, The Golden Legend and The Wasted Vigil.
From these, we found you eight quotes that are sure to make you fall in love with the power and emotions of his words, all over again.
Business Books to Look Out For
“Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs” – Farrah Gray
Whether you’re thinking of setting up your own business – and need some inspiration or advice – or whether you need help making improvements in your already-existing business, we’ve got a set of books for you. Here we have a list of business books for you to pick up, by authors with lots of experience in the field that are bound to help you take your company to new heights.
Let’s take a look!
Talent Wins: The New Playbook for Putting People First
Turning conventional views on their heads, talent and leadership experts Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey provide leaders with a new and different playbook for acquiring, managing, and deploying talent–for today’s agile, digital, analytical, technologically driven strategic environment–and for creating the HR function that business needs.
Disrupt and Conquer: How TTK Prestige Became a Billion-Dollar Business
In this book, the current chairman T.T. Jagannathan, along with Sandhya Mendonca, takes us through the journey of this extraordinary company which fought off bankruptcy and rose like a phoenix to become a highly profitable, successful entity. With invaluable business lessons, decades of experience and innovation distilled in these pages, Disrupt and Conquer is a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs, executives and business leaders.
The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World
At Stanford University, If you had majored in the humanities or social sciences, you were a fuzzy. If you had majored in the computer sciences, you were a techie. This informal division quietly found its way into a default assumption that has misled the business world for decades-that it’s the techies who drive innovation. But in this brilliantly contrarian book, Scott Hartley reveals the counter-intuitive reality of business today: it’s actually the fuzzies-not the techies-who are playing the key roles in developing the most creative and successful new business ideas.
Shortcut Your Start-Up
The world of startups is more competitive than ever: what will make yours stand out from the crowd? Shortcut Your Startup has the answers you need. Star entrepreneurs Courtney and Carter Reum have invested in such global successes as Lyft, Pinterest and SpaceX, as well as launching a multimillion-dollar business of their own – they have the hands on experience, insights and tips that will make all the difference.
Games Customers Play – What they don’t tell you about buyer-seller relationships
Business has been an endless series of games played by buyers and sellers-with one difference. Both sides could win at the same time. But somewhere along the way, many customers have changed the rules of these games in their favour. In Games Customers Play, Ramesh Dorairaj shows you how to spot such games and change the rules to your advantage. So that it doesn’t matter what the deal is, you will always win!
The Two Minute Revolution: The Art of Constantly Creating Value in Business
Sangeeta Talwar, the first woman executive in the FMCG industry, who established one of the most beloved and enduring brands of India-Maggi Noodles-shares creative and strategic lessons which can help you grow and add value to your business. Insightful and packed with fascinating examples, this book suggests tried and trusted strategies for building extraordinary brands.
Creating Signature Stories
In Creating Signature Stories, branding guru David Aaker applies the power of intriguing, authentic, involving stories to communicate strategic messaging internally and externally, a critical and difficult task. Creating Signature Stories, full of case studies, discusses how to find, evaluate, refine and leverage great stories and use them to build brands, enhance customer relationships and inspire employees.
Here, There and Everywhere: 5 Sudha Murty Stories you Must Read
Wearer of many hats-philanthropist, entrepreneur, computer scientist, engineer, teacher-Sudha Murty has above all always been a storyteller extraordinaire.
Here, There and Everywhere is a celebration of her literary journey and is her 200th title across genres and languages. It brings together her best-loved stories from various collections.
Here are 5 stories by her that you must read, from this collection.
Sudha Murty talks about her journey as a writer in A Tale of Many Tales. She mentions how her mother would force her to sit down and write about the events of her day, and how this ultimately lead to ‘inadvertently improving her expression and adding clarity to her ideas’.
R.H. Kulkarni, a young medical doctor was posted to a small dispensary in a quiet village. One night, during a heavy rain, he heard a knock on his door. Four men wrapped in woolen rugs stood with sticks in their hand. They forced him out of his house and made him sit in a bullock cart. Where were they taking him? Read this gripping story to find out more.
A middle aged man brings an old man with no friends or family into the authors office, saying he met him on the bus stop and needed help in relocating him to an old-age home. A few months later, the old man is in hospital. When she goes to visit him, she sees the same middle-aged man there as well. Who is he and why is he there?
On an overcrowded train from Bombay to Bangalore, the author comes across a young girl in torn clothes without a ticket. She pays the ticket collector the fare for the girl but is unable to get her to talk. When she finally does, she finds out she’s a run away with nowhere to go. She helps her find place in a shelter in Bangalore not realizing then, the long way the girl will go from there, all thanks to a simple train ticket.
Sudha Murty tells us the story of being the only female in her engineering college. She shares her struggles-first in being allowed to actually attend the college, and then those she faced while being there. However, she was adamant to do complete her course and ended up doing better than most of the boys. She joined college as a scared teenager but left as a confident and bright young engineer.
5 Quotes from Daisy Khan on Gender Equality
Born with Wings is a powerful, eye-opening account of Daisy Khan’s inspiring journey of self-actualization. Guided by her faith, Daisy Khan is a women’s advocate and has devised innovative ways to help end child marriage, fight against genital mutilation, and, most recently, educate young Muslims to resist the false promises of ISIS recruiters.
Here are some of Daisy Khan’s thoughts on Islam and gender equality:
The Quran, believed to be the central religious text of Islam, lays great emphasis on upholding a woman’s dignity no matter what the circumstances.
By carefully studying the holy Quran, Daisy Khan was convinced that gender equality has always been a part of Islam. However, because of misguided interpretations of the Quran especially by men, women have suffered several injustices.
Daisy Khan points, that in the religious scriptures of Islam, nowhere is it stated as a rule that a woman has to maintain her modesty by wearing hijabs or burqas.
Muslim women have historically always had rights. Fourteen hundred years ago, when these rights were not granted to even Western women, Muslim women have had the right to property, the right to divorce, the right to inheritance and the right to have a career simply because men and women are considered equal in Islam. The situation is quite different today simply because of faulty interpretations of the Quran’s verses.
8 Things worth knowing about Subhadra Sen Gupta
Peppered with stunning illustrations and unusual trivia, A Bagful of History is a fascinating read about how children lived in the times of King Ashoka, Emperor Akbar, Raja Raja Chola and during the Uprising of 1857. In these dozen stories you will travel back in time to the India of the past.
The fact that Subhadra Sen Gupta has written over thirty books for children including mysteries, historical adventures, ghost stories and comic books is well documented but we found some rather interesting things that very few people know about the author. Scroll below to know now!
Here are 8 things you didn’t know about the author who loves writing for children:
Meet Seven Women who Fought against Triple Talaq
The battle against instant talaq has garnered public attention for a long time now. In Till Talaq Do Us Part, Ziya Us Salam, an eminent social commentator and an associate editor at Frontline, presents a holistic view of how divorce works in Islam.
Banning triple talaq was no easy feat. It happened through the struggle and effort of many people. Ziya specifically talks about seven women who questioned established mores and practices common to all patriarchal societies beyond the boundaries of religion. Their fight is what took the case to the Supreme Court.
Let’s meet the women behind the ban on Triple Talaq.
It was experience that held Zakia in good stead as she piloted the movement for Muslim women’s rights.
Her first marriage had been a tale of subjugation and oppression in which she suffered emotionally, socially and physically. She suffered alone in the privacy of her home with her son as witness and co-abused. Her middleclass upbringing did not allow her to speak out against the injustice. She found happiness only in her second attempt at matrimony. This union, however, invited huge criticism from patriarchal quarters. The fact that her husband is a Hindu has been used to attack her campaign for Muslim women’s rights.
As she helped marginalized women fight everyday battles, Noorjehan began to appreciate the challenges that lay ahead. That, in turn, led to her founding the BMMA with Zakia Soman, who had also tapped into her reservoirs of inner strength after the 2002 Gujarat violence.
Also notable was Noorjehan’s attempt to train Muslim women to be qazis, to apprise them of what the Quran says, what the Sunna of the Prophet says. They set up Darul Uloom Niswaan, a centre for Islamic learning. The centre trains women qazis in the study of the Quran, the Hadith and the sharia. The women are trained to conduct nikah, fill up nikahnamas, etc. Then followed all-women sharia courts, which interpret religious injunctions in a manner deemed fair to women.
For years, Shayara Bano put up with her property dealer husband’s demand for dowry, a car and cash. For years, she underwent abortions. In the absence of any social support, she was reduced to being a helpless soul. A kidney ailment and the absence of medical care at her husband’s place in Allahabad forced Shayara Bano to go back to her parents’ in Uttarakhand for treatment. It was a small step for Shayara Bano that was to prove a giant leap for womankind.
As she explored her options to hold her husband accountable, she met the volunteers of the BMMA and approached the Supreme Court. The court clubbed her petition with the larger case against instant talaq or triple talaq.
The verdict may have pleased many, but it left Ishrat homeless and hopeless.
Instead, she decided to give a new direction to her life by joining politics. Towards the end of 2017, she joined the Bharatiya Janata Party and pledged to work for all women who have suffered.
With help from her brothers, she approached the Supreme Court after they got to know of the Shayara Bano case. In the highest court, her petition was clubbed with that of Shayara Bano.
In January 2017, she approached the Supreme Court to invalidate triple talaq as it violated the fundamental rights of a woman. Her petition was clubbed with that of Shayara Bano and others. The court set aside instant triple talaq, but there was no direct word on the status of her marriage. Atiya hopes that the verdict will end the agony of those women who have suffered for no fault of their own.
